Sushi Restaurants Drop Japanese Fish on Radiation Fears

Sushi restaurants are dropping Japanese fresh food from their menus as a radiation plume released by the country’s damaged nuclear plant heightened fears over possible radioactive contamination. Photographer: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images

March 18 (Bloomberg) -- Sushi restaurants are dropping
Japanese fresh food from their menus as a radiation plume
released by a damaged nuclear plant in the country heightens
fears over possible radioactive contamination.

“Our guests’ safety is our top priority,” said Sari Yong,
a spokeswoman for Shangri-La Asia Ltd., the region’s biggest
luxury hotel company by market value with 71 locations
worldwide. “As a precaution, we have temporarily stopped
importing fresh food from Japan.”

The Mandarin Oriental International Ltd.’s flagship in Hong
Kong and the city’s Four Seasons Hotel have stopped buying food
from Japan even as experts including chemical pathology
professor Lam Ching-wan say the health risks haven’t been
established. The U.S. and U.K. governments are among those that
have advised citizens to consider leaving Japan as concerns
mounted that authorities were losing the battle to contain leaks
from the quake-stricken nuclear plant north of Tokyo.

“Until the situation stabilizes in the country, it seems
unlikely that guests will feel comfortable consuming Japanese
produce,” said Sally De Souza, public relations manager for the
Mandarin Oriental hotel group.

Soldiers, Firefighters

Power may be restored to one of the crippled reactors at
the damaged Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant today, improving the odds
that workers can prevent a meltdown and further radiation leaks.

Japanese soldiers and firefighters from Tokyo, using 30
fire engines, began dousing sea water on reactor No. 3, site of
an explosion earlier this week. Tokyo Electric Power Co. said it
may finish reconnecting a power line to the cooling system of
the No. 2 reactor. The power link would be used to restart pumps
needed to pour cooling water on overheating fuel rods.

Concerns about radiation levels in food have prompted South
Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Singapore and the
Philippines to screen food imports from Japan. The U.S. Food and
Drug Administration is monitoring Japanese food for
contamination and weighing steps that “may include increased
and targeted product sampling,” it said in an e-mail.

Authorities aren’t taking any chances even as public fears
of risks from eating contaminated fish may be overdone, say
experts.

Japan’s Tests

“These are more like a precaution than a decision based on
fact,” said Lam Ching-wan, a professor of Chemical Pathology at
the University of Hong Kong. “I think eating food or fish from
Japan is unlikely to lead to cancer,” he said.

Japan will start testing of agricultural and marine food
products as early as today for possible contamination by
radioactivity, Kumiko Tanaka, an official at the Ministry of
Health, Labour and Welfare’s policy planning and communication
division, said today.

Foods required for testing include grains, milk,
vegetables, meat and eggs, she said.

After the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, people
developed thyroid cancer after consuming milk from contaminated
cows. The likelihood of fish absorbing sufficiently large
quantities of radioactivity from the ocean is “negligible,”
Lam said, except among larger fish who live long enough to
accumulate large amounts.

Chernobyl

At Chernobyl, the source of radioactivity came from the
soil while in the ocean the radioactive dust particles are
diluted, he said.

P.C. Kesavan, a former director of the biomedical group at
the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai, agrees the risks
are small.

“The amount of contaminated fish and others will be a
small proportion,” he said. “But you don’t know which one is
contaminated and which one is not. So the precautionary
principle is to ban all fish coming from there.”

The reluctance to buy seafood from Japan is affecting the
nation’s fish traders, who are already suffering from the damage
caused by the March 11 earthquake and the ensuing tsunami.

“We are not selling anything because there are no
customers,” says Kengo Kumamoto, a 30-year-old worker at
wholesaler Miyake Fisheries at the Tsukiji Market in Tokyo.

Yoshikatsu Ikuta said the wholesale fish shop he runs at the
same market has seen sales fall. "Sales to restaurants are
completely down, and they’re all doing badly."

Japan exported 195 billion yen ($2.4 billion) worth of
seafood last year, accounting for 0.3 percent of total exports,
according to data on the website of the Ministry of Agriculture,
Forestry and Fisheries.

Tokyo Sushi Bars

Sushi bars in Tokyo are also suffering. The normally busy
Tsukiji Sushi Ichiban restaurant, located next to the wholesale
fish market, was empty yesterday afternoon.

“We had a lot of customers until last Friday,” said 59-year-old sushi chef Shinichi Niiyama. “Sales are really
falling, we’ve probably lost about 70 percent, and a lot of it
is from the lack of tourists.”

The Four Seasons Hotels Inc.’s Hong Kong hotel suspended
all imports of Japanese food, including Wagyu beef, sea scallops
and abalone, and substituted them with products from New Zealand
and Australia, Claire Blackshaw, director of public relations,
said in a phone interview yesterday.

The Hong Kong government has been conducting tests for
radiation levels on all food imported from Japan since March 12
and gives daily updates of food safety on a website.

The Centre for Food Safety (CFS) of the Hong Kong Food and
Environmental Hygiene Department has found all 86 shipments of
food from Japan, including meat, seafood, fruits, vegetables and
cereals, were safe after testing them for radiation levels,
according to the website updated at 2 p.m. Hong Kong time
yesterday.

Seafood From Scotland

The Zuma restaurant chain’s Hong Kong branch is
substituting most of its imported Japanese products with seafood
from Scotland and Indonesia, General Manager Christian Talpo
said.

“We are not married to any supplier and have the
flexibility to switch on a dime,” Talpo said.

“Our priority is not only in ensuring the safety and
integrity of the produce to our customers, but also to be
sympathetic to food leaving a country whose population is in
crisis,” Monica Brown, a spokeswoman for Zuma and Roka
restaurants in the UK, said in an e-mail.

Japanese chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa’s NOBU Intercontinental
Hong Kong restaurant has asked all its Japanese suppliers to
provide certificates of origin showing that the products don’t
come from affected areas in Japan, said Carole Klein, head of
public relations at the Intercontinental Hotel.

Klein quoted Matsuhisa as saying that his other restaurants
in the U.S., U.K. and Australia bought most of their ingredients
locally and relied on local food and environmental authorities
to monitor the quality of imports.